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Susan Fenimore Cooper's Ecology of Reading

Citation:

Irmscher, Christoph . 2014. “Susan Fenimore Cooper's Ecology of Reading”. Partial Answers 12(1): 41-61. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/535666.
  • Christoph Irmscher

Date Published:

3 Jan, 2014

Abstract:

 

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look.  Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truthfully) is part of a larger critique of the paternalistic spirit that helped found the very place she writes about — Cooperstown, New York. More unobtrusively than Thoreau, Cooper develops her own sophisticated version of an “ecology of reading,” brilliantly anticipating recent attempts by ecocritics to imagine a “democracy of all life-forms” (Timothy Morton).

 

Christoph Irmscher is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. His books include The Poetics of Natural HistoryLongfellow Redux, and Public Poet, Private Man as well as the co-edited collection A Keener Perception:  Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (with Alan Braddock, College of William and Mary).  For the Library of America, he has edited John James Audubon's Writings and Drawings. His most recent book, the biography Louis Agassiz:  Creator of American Science, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was selected as “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Book Review.  Christoph Irmscher’s fields of expertise include 19th and 20th century American and Canadian literature, with a special focus on nature and science writing, history of the book, and poetry.  He was featured in two documentaries about John James Audubon, the award-winning American Masters program Drawn from Nature and, more recently, A Summer of Birds, produced by Louisiana Public Television.  His online exhibit on H. W Longfellow won a Leab Award from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. He can be reached through his homepage at www.christophirmscher.com.

updated in June 2014

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/15/2020